Washington College Magazine and Website

Until recently, the only reminder of those Washington College alumni who dedicated
their lives to the military was a small bronze plaque honoring World War II veterans in
William Smith Hall.

Over the past two years, more than 200 stories of sacrifice and honor have surfaced,
thanks to the Alumni Veterans Project. Judith Barroll ’88 M’91, director of alumni programs, and Bruce Alexander ’94 M’00, chair of the Alumni Board’s Awards Committee, spearheaded the project. According to Barroll, the idea evolved when an alumnus noticed that the College had no online or on-campus forum to honor alumni who have served in war. Barroll brought the oversight to the attention of the Alumni Awards Committee.

Taylor Goss ’13 began his sophomore year in a language suite hoping to improve his French; he completed the year fully prepared to study abroad. Living in close proximity to a French student, Goss and his suitemates soon mastered the language.

“The language suites are the closest thing to immersion that WC has to offer short of going abroad, and it also seemed like a good way of practicing before actually going to France,” says the French and international studies major, now in Grenoble.

Early American dramatists staged hundreds of original plays for eager audiences, and contrary to popular belief, this era of American theatre wasn’t “bad”; many of the plays were innovative and well-crafted. More than half of these original plays, however, have been lost to history. Other than advertisements in yellowed newspapers and broadsides, there is virtually no evidence that they ever existed.

Alex Foxwell ‘16 would just as much enjoy reading about the Baltimore Plot of 1861 as he would Death of a Salesman. So when the drama and history major started thinking about how to spend his summer break, he didn’t to choose pursuing one of his passions over the other: he decided to try them both.

Rebecca Sussman ‘13 found her calling in Oceania as a secret member of the Thought Police. In the real world, she was a junior at Westfield High School, VA; in her AP English teacher’s classroom model of George Orwell’s 1984, Sussman was a clever ally for Big Brother. She co-founded an online resistance group and turned in any rebellious comrades who decided to join—her teacher was “horrified at what I was doing, but she was also proud of me,” she recalls.